What is the purpose of the "Prefech" directory under Windows XP? There sure are some supicious file names.

February 3rd, 2002, 05:47 AM

Tedob1

Prefetch Directory

To minimize seeking even further, every three days or so, during system idle periods, the Task Scheduler organizes a list of files and directories in the order that they are referenced during a boot or application start, and stores the list in a file named \Windows\Prefech\Layout.ini. Figure 1 shows the contents of a prefetch directory, highlighting the layout file. Then it launches the system defragmenter with a command-line option that tells the defragmenter to defragment based on the contents of the file instead of performing a full defrag. The defragmenter finds a contiguous area on each volume large enough to hold all the listed files and directories that reside on that volume and then moves them in their entirety into that area so that they are stored one after the other. Thus, future prefetch operations will even be more efficient because all the data to be read in is now stored physically on the disk in the order it will be read. Since the number of files defragmented for prefetching is usually only in the hundreds, this defragmentation is much faster than full defragmentations.